For several of the past election cycles, in an effort to curb vote fraud in Wisconsin’s largest municipalities, concerned voters have sought to monitor polling locations, even in other parts of the state, and challenge certain electors to mitigate vote fraud where questionable registrations have occurred.

But this bill discourages the active monitoring and encouragement of fraud-free elections. It dictates that in the city of Milwaukee, challenges of electors (voters) may only be made by residents of the same ward. Bluntly, it disallows poll watchers from suburban communities from challenging known fraud.

Consider that for the intentionally ambiguous “use of or threaten to make use of force, violence, restraint, or any tactic of coercion or intimidation in order to induce or compel any person to vote or refrain from voting or to refrain from registering to vote at an election, and no person may use or threaten to use force or violence or by use of any threat of any act of coercion or intimidation compel, induce, or prevail upon an elector either to vote or refrain from voting at any election for or against a candidate or question. The bill also provides that no person may knowingly attempt to prevent or deter another person from voting or registering to vote based upon fraudulent, deceptive, or spurious grounds or information” a poll watcher can be fined or imprisoned for a term greater than actually committing vote fraud!

Additionally, Democrats would like to see “any nationally focused nonprofit organization to enable matching of information in the records of that organization with publicly available information in GAB (Government Accountability Board) records that GAB obtained from (the Department of Transportation).” In short, groups like the now-defunct ACORN, other similar community organizing groups or public-sector employee unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees would be able to contract with our state’s Government Accountability Board to register voters and crosscheck their own existing records with little to no oversight.

In addition to motorvoter provisions in the bill (provisions that would automatically register people to vote when they register their vehicles at the Division of Motor Vehicles and consequently clog and load up the voter rolls and encourage fraudulent use of names on the registry), it also specifies that people who receive any form of government assistance could also be registered at the point of contact with government.

As the aforementioned provision specifies, this could open up very private, personal information to nefarious use by so-called advocates with less-than-benevolent aims in an attempt to manipulate and defraud our electoral system.

It mortifies me that in the waning days of the legislative session in Madison and in the runup to this fall’s elections, that politicians’ fear of the near-certain tea leaves would prompt them to undermine our elections with a brazen and transparent attempt to rewrite our election laws.

Nelson’s fulminations might be valid if suburban poll watchers had found vote fraud but in fact it amounts to little more than intimidation and harrassment of legally registered voters.

This little piece is my favorite part, though.

“(provisions that would automatically register people to vote when they register their vehicles at the Division of Motor Vehicles and consequently clog and load up the voter rolls and encourage fraudulent use of names on the registry”

So what Nelson is saying is that efforts to make sure that DMV’s records match the voter rolls will clog the system but the fact that the voter rolls don’t currently match the DMV’s records is proof of fraud.

I would be willing to wager that most Republican’s would be more willing to accept the automatic voter registration provisions if the next logical step were also included … to require a photo ID at the time of voting. Absent that provision, the intent of the auto registration is absolutely transparent, and has NOTHING to do with getting voter rolls to match DMV records.